Ellsworth Kelly is one of the leading American abstract artists of the late twentieth century. He belongs to the generation that emerged in the 1950s after the Abstract Expressionists, developing a cooler, more detached and lyrical form of large-scale abstract painting. This exhibition, Kelly's first retro- spective in Britain, will include fifty works, both paintings and sculptures, from 1949 to the present. Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923, Kelly studied art in Boston and Paris after serving in the US Army in the Second World War. During his time in France he developed his distinctive approach to abstract art, taking points of departure from both modern and earlier art and architecture. Kelly moved back to New York in 1954 and since 1970 he has lived and worked in upstate New York. |
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Kelly's art, while of the greatest possible purity of colour, line and form, is always based on his perceptions of the real world: either the urban or the natural environment. Paintings may derive from a carefully observed play of shadow, from the curve of a bridge or hillside, the shape of a doorwav, thc pattern of glazing bars on a window. Ellsworth Kelly (bl923) 31ue Curve 1996 Private Collection The artist |
Ellsworth Kelly (bl923) blue Curve 1996 Private Collection ©The artist (b1923) Gaza 1952-6 Private Collection ©The artist (b1923) Purple Panel with Blue Curve 1989 Constance R Caplan, Baltimore ©The artist |